'Amazing Spider-Man': Requiem for the Andrew Garfield era

The secondSpider-Manmovie franchise died a quiet death on Tuesday night. News broke that Sony will partner with Disney in an unusual, rival-schools-united-by-fate arrangement that will bring the web-swinging superhero into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That will be followed by a standalone Spider-Manmovie in 2017, and then probably by at least one Marvel-movie guest appearancethat will last just long enough for Spidey to ask what an Infinity Stone is.

Long live Spider-Man; Spider-Man is dead! For this news almost certainly sounds the Sad Funeral Trombone forThe Amazing Spider-Man, a preboot saga that Sony had once envisioned as a megafranchise to rival the Marvel Cinematic Universe.Amazing Spider-Manwas supposed to produce spinoffs, sequels; there was a time when Sony boldly announcedAmazing Spider-Man 3and4before2had even arrived in theaters. Butlast yearsAmazing Spider-Man 2underperformed significantly at the box office, proving decisively that people maybe only needed twomovies where Spider-Man fightssome kind of Green-ish Goblin-type.

There are already some reports thatAmazingstar Andrew Garfield is definitely out as Spider-Man. Sony did not immediately respond to EWs request for comment, but even if Garfielddoeskeep the job, its a fair bet that Spider-Mans future will pretty much ignore the tone and plot of theAmazingsub-franchise. Best-case-scenario, Sony and Marvel decides to just skip a decade of Peter Parkers life and let the 31-year-old Garfield act his age. Most likely scenario, Marvel Studios pays about as much attention toThe Amazing Spider-Manas it does to any movie with the word Hulk in the title.

This would be the time to mournThe Amazing Spider-Man, if there was anything in particular to mourn about. But future historians will mainly remember Sonys prequel duet as a rare example of almost everything that could go wrong with Hollywood in the franchise era.Amazing Spider-Manwas a trope factory for hand-me-down concepts.

The first film was an awkward attempt to simultaneouslytransform theSpider-Manfranchise into bothThe Dark KnightandTwilight. Here was an explicitly darker-realer-grittier Spidey than the Raimi filmsPeter Parker wears ahoodie, bro!but that realness was already approaching sub-Poochie market-tested Xtremity. There is a scene where Peter Parker demonstrates his new powers by doing rad skateboard tricks; the scene is set to Coldplay. Spider-Man, Skateboard, Coldplay; Spider-Man, Skateboard, Coldplay: Repeat it 10 times and it still wont quite make sense.

ButThe Amazing Spider-Manalso bears a strong resemblance to the bumper crop of YA-inflected romances that followed inTwilights wake. The idea to send Peter Parker back to high school wasnt bad; theres plenty of material in the comics, and the notion of an everyteen loser superhero feels just as unusual now as it ever did. Superheroes onscreen now are trending biceppy(Hugh Jackman, Henry Cavill, Chris Hemsworth) and uber-rich (Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark.) Why not bring back lovable, puny, relatable Parker?

ExceptThe Amazing Spider-Manopted to include some of the less well-conceived later additions to the canonSpider-Mans parents were spies or whatever!and in the process transformed lovable, puny, relatable Peter Parker into a sneering James Dean-chosen one. A young boy, left on his aunt and uncles doorstep, hunting down a mysterious Great Evil who killed his parents mysteriously: Some of this comes from the comics, but it still felt like J.K. Rowling deserved a co-writing credit.

There were good parts in bothAmazingmovies, but even those good parts feel weirdly emblematic of the failings of contemporary blockbuster franchising. The films caught Emma Stone at the specific moment that she became Emma Stone: Filming onAmazing 1began just a few months after Stones star turn inEasy A, feels in hindsight like a gift from an alternate universe where teen films trended goofy instead of moody. The year beforeAmazings release saw Stone in fine form, inThe HelpandCrazy, Stupid Love; in the months sinceAmazing 2hit theaters, Stone earned her first Oscar nomination, forBirdman. So her work in theAmazingfranchise feels like a particular black hole on a sparkling resum: An excellent actress struggling against all odds to triumph over material that was always going to turn her into a damsel in distress. Her chemistry with co-star Andrew Garfield was palpabletheyre dating, have you heard?but you watch the movies now and wonder if a bold bit of casting couldve just given us thesuperheromovie we all really wanted. Emma Stone as Patricia Parker, maybe? With Andrew Garfield as handsome emo-BF Glen Stacy, her dude in distress? It couldve been bad; it couldnt have been worse than what we got.

In director Marc Webbs defense, the films looked prettyespeciallyAmazing 2, which was shot on 35 mm film in some actual New York locations. The locations look great inAmazing 2: Your eyes turn to them, desperate to get away from whatever is happening in the actual movie. TheAmazingsequel tried to pack a lot in: Electro, the Green Goblin, the Rhino made appearances; there were endingteases for Doctor Octopus and the Vulture; Felicity Jones played a character who was maybe kinda sorta the Black Cat, which if youre counting makes two future female Oscar nominees just utterly wasted. Jesus Christ, BJ Novak had a cameo as Alistair Smythe, a B-minus level villain who built anti-Spidey robots!

Amazing 2ended with a tease for future films: A mystery man walking through a laboratory filled with evil supervillain hardware. Remarkably, insanely, this was almost precisely whereAmazing Spider-Man 1had ended. The intrinsic message of both movies seemed to be: Stick with us! Were almost about to start getting to the good stuff! In that sense,theAmazingscould be Patient Zero for encroaching Origin Fatigue: The sense that people might finally be getting fed up with the storybeforethe story. How many more times do we have to see Uncle Ben get killed? How many more times do we need to watch Peter hanging out with his best pal Harry Osborn, blissfully unaware that anybody named Osborn will probably go Green sooner or later?

Read the original post:
'Amazing Spider-Man': Requiem for the Andrew Garfield era